Golden ratio in web design

Several months ago I have written an article about photography in web design and I got really inspired to write one about golden ratio in web design as it is as important for UX design as for photography.

UX design requires creativity and well thought tested ideas, sometimes even perfection and natural balance. If you want to be on the same wave with Leonardo Da Vinci, Salvador Dali and other extraordinary creative and genius people, you need to know what all of them have in common: usage of golden ratio in their designs. And today we will look at why and how to use golden ratio in web design to achieve beautifully balanced interface and make people enjoy their experience with your product.

To be honest it all comes from the Ancient Greeks, who were one of the first ones to discover a beautiful asymmetry found in nature: trees, flowers, animals, people, etc. They expressed this phenomenon with the Greek letter phi, but today, we call it the golden ratio. Since that times artists and architects have used a strong understanding of proportions and the essence of golden ratio to create aesthetically pleasing architecture and pieces of art. Even now we consider beautiful people to have golden ratio proportions and we form this opinion unconsciously; the location of eye brows, nose, mouth, eyes, etc.

Now like many years ago, golden ratio is used to determine the format of credit cards, books, furniture, interior design, decoration of the plates in the restaurants, etc. You see it in Twitter’s dashboard, in Pyramids of Giza, in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, in the logo of Google, Pepsi, Twitter, Apple, etc. It’s literally everywhere you look. We were grown with golden ratio, most of the masterpieces that we studied at school had this golden ratio proportions. Sometimes we don’t really know why we choose certain option over another one, but in most of the cases if we start measuring the proportion, we will see that golden ratio designs are the preferred ones.

The same happens with ux design. Web pages have a more classical and balanced appearance when UX designers use golden ratio in web design. These designs just look right and unconsciously they are pleasing to the users. Images, blocks of text, sidebars, buttons, etc can all be nicely placed in golden rectangles that form a “perfect” design. Visitors feel comfortable interacting with the website because the proportions are familiar to them from many works of art, classical buildings and nature.

Remember my article about neuroscience in web design ? There we talked about importance of familiarity, unconscious mind and how we can influence it. By using the golden ratio in web design, you become appealing to your viewers and unconsciously the layout of the website looks perfect for them as well as familiar. That makes them much more likely to read on and view your website in depth. Golden Ratio in web design is also used to balance content that is text heavy, create hierarchy and draw users’ eyes to specific areas. This is one of the triggers you can use if you want to use neuroscience in your works and play with different parts of the brain.

Math and science are beautiful. They help us discover unknown things and better understand ourselves & our target. As we discussed before most aesthetically pleasing designs have math in common. Let’s see more in details what is golden ratio in web design and what are the numbers behind it.

GOLDEN RATIO IN WEB DESIGN: MATH & BEAUTY

The golden ratio is known for the proportions 1:1.618. Of course, the mathematical equation at work is much more complicated than that, but this is the base for the creation. Just to give you an example, let’s look at rectangle with golden proportions:

We take the width of 1000 pixels and divide it by 1.618 to get a height of about 618 pixels. Then we add a 618 x 618 square on the right side of the canvas, leaving behind a 382 x 618 rectangle on the left side – another golden rectangle, etc! As you could get, a “Golden Rectangle” is a rectangle whose length is 1.6180 times its width.

The golden rectangle is the most used shape to visualize the golden ratio, but you can also use circles and triangles in a very similar way.

For instance, as you can see on the picture you can create an approximate golden spiral shape out of circles and those circles fit perfectly inside a system of golden rectangles. It is again aesthetically appealing look and tends to achieve visual harmony.

A lot of designers use it, a lot of designers don’t. It’s up to you, normally if a person like numbers, math and perfection, he uses golden ratio to be 100% sure the design is well thought and calculated.

Now let’s see how golden ratio can be used in other design elements:

TYPOGRAPHY

If you want to use golden ratio, it is important to implement it in your typographical graphic design elements as well. For example, let’s say that you’re using 10pt font for the body text. Using the golden ratio, you can determine the best size for the headings by multiplying the body text number by 1.618. So, in our case it will be 10*1.618 = 16.18, which you can round down to 16pt font. The combination of 10 and 16 looks really nice and at the same time it is good for UX design as you can clearly see the headline, sometimes math does some work for you!

IMAGES

It’s all about how you crop the photos and how you size them. When you crop pictures with the golden ratio in mind, you might also consider using the golden spiral as a guide for the shot’s composition.

LAYOUT

Golden ratio is also used to divide space between the body of the website and the sidebar. The principle is the same, body is 1.618 times larger than the sidebar. Let’s say you want to find the width of your Main Content and Sidebar columns. You would take the total width of your content area, for example 900px and divide it by 1.62, the result is 555.55px. It is not necessary to be that accurate, so you can actually round it to 555px. Now you know your main content element will be 555px wide and your sidebar will be 345px.

GOLDEN RATIO IN WEB DESIGN: TOOLS

Phi Calculator – great tool to know golden ratio dimensions. You just need to enter any number into this tool and it will give you the result you need for the golden ratio. It’s free and very easy to use.